GOP battle plan: Pick your fights with Obama

The fractious GOP hierarchy seems to have finally settled on a message when it comes to President Barack Obama: take a deep breath and don’t take the bait.

Overtly in speeches and more subtly with their actions, GOP leaders and potential 2016 presidential candidates are sending a message to their party that it ought not let itself be radicalized by Obama’s ambitious and decidedly left-leaning second-term agenda.

But in their next breath, following condemnation of the president’s liberalism, the would-be GOP standard-bearers are imploring conservatives to not just oppose Obama but devise an agenda of their own that they can present to voters.

These Republicans, it seems, are dreading a replay of the past four years in which a triumphant Obama win leads to a conservative backlash at the polls in 2014 but the party is then tranquilized into believing it can win gold in the next presidential cycle by doing nothing but loudly opposing the administration.

Instead, top GOP officials are calling for a more strategic mix of opposition and accommodation, though of course they wouldn’t dare call it that. Broadly put, it looks something like this: fight Obama on some issues but don’t give him easy public relations wins by getting bogged down in fiscal fights and obstructing proposals like immigration reform. And, oh yes, offer an agenda of your own.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan has been the most explicit about this new tack and gave it a name, or perhaps a euphemism, in a speech in Washington on Saturday at a conference staged by the National Review Institute: “prudence.”

“He’ll try to divide us with phony emergencies and bogus deals,” Ryan warned of Obama. “He’ll try to get us to fight with each other — to question each other’s motives—so we don’t challenge him. If we play into his hands, we will betray the voters who supported us — and the country we mean to serve. We can’t let that happen. We have to be smart. We have to show prudence.”

In a political context, prudence is most associated with Dana Carvey’s wicked impression of the slightly awkward but ever temperate George H.W. Bush — “not gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent.” In other words, a plate of cooked broccoli in today’s red meat Republican Party.

But to Ryan and other leading Republicans, there now seems to be considerable virtue in prudence, if not moderation.

“We won’t play the villain in his morality plays,” said Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and last year’s vice presidential nominee in his Saturday address. “We have to stay united. We have to show that — if given the chance — we can govern. We have better ideas.”

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker echoed his fellow Cheesehead about how the GOP should respond to Obama’s agenda.